I'm Not Funny Anymore

I'm doing kegels right now.

Let's go grab coffee and catch up yeah? Let's go get lunch and catch up yeah? Let's go get dinner and catch up yeah? I don't hate this the first time I meet somebody, because sometimes you need to get that full story of a person. It's necessary. But the third time we "get coffee and catch up," we have ran out of things to talk about. We're dead in the water and it becomes them talking about their issues or me talking about my issues or the same old interview on why I am moving to Vietnam. I used to be a funny guy, you gotta trust me on this. But these interactions make me come off as some deep psychologist when I identify as both deep and a shithead. I think the problem is 100% me.

There's lots of ways of making people laugh. One common way is making fun of someone. I don't like this one unless the other person really trusts me, so instead I self-deprecate. Another way is absurdism, which is to say the most absurd thing you can think of. "Do you guys think AncestryDNA is a good dating app?" My favorite joke is to point out odd things people have in common but don't admit. One thing is "horny clicks," like how horny is your Youtube recommendations because you clicked on an attractive person. Sometimes, it's super, super risky, like using the term "carcinization" when describing how all the guys at a party look and dress the same. It's a hit when the person you're talking to is a marine biologist.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I loved loved loooved the deep conversations I was having. It wasn't something I had with my old friends as much, and I felt like I was growing so much. Then a year passed and I started getting tired of it. I have googled so many times, "How to be funny again." and, "Am I not funny anymore?" I want to have deep conversations, but I also want to have fun! I blamed the pandemic, and I blamed adulthood, which both can be true. Both of these things isolated us from each other, and we had less common experiences as a result. I also blamed work because I can't escape "work-talk" and self-help books which keeps pulling my language towards "therapy-talk". I'm also kinda pissed that some people labeled me as a "softy" and are more careful with their words around me, like dude I've already seen goatse and blue waffle. I've perused /b/ when I was 10 years old. Nothing can offend me. (But I’m also a tumblr kid, so there’s so many different sides to me.)

Ugh! Sometimes I just want to grab people by the neck and shake them, not just because I have a breath-play fetish, but because I want to yell, “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW ME!!!” How can you know me unless we’ve snorted molly water we got for free and got close to a 6:00 AM homoerotic Sports Basement experience in a car after a SutroFM rave? That… Totally didn’t happen by the way.

My roommates and I laugh a LOT together. I think it's because we spend a lot of time together, so we know a bunch about each other and have a whole pool of things to draw from. Even if we had nothing in common before, we just spend so much time together that we create new common experiences. So the title of this is clickbait. I think I'm still funny, I just don't think I have enough material. It's hard to come up with material if all we do is sit on a chair at a coffee shop and dump for two hours.

I don't enjoy talking about myself, or being the center of attention. I don't like answering the same questions of "What are you going to do in Vietnam?" "Do you have any plans for when you get to Vietnam?" "What's it like to quit your job after a year?" "How did you come up with your games?" I write these blogs so that I don't have to have the same conversations over and over again. And these things aren't just me y’know? yunnow? you know? Spend more time with me and you'll learn how often I have to go to the bathroom. Or the fact that I'm obsessed with talking about poops. However, it is my fault for not coming up with better activities to get to know each other more. Let's go on a walk, let's get caught in a rain, let's go to a concert, let's catch a movie, let's go pick up trash.

On Dias De Los Muertos, I invited my friends Connie, Rit, and Kyla out to hang out with me. There was a moment that I felt captured everyone's personalities. In this exact moment, we have Connie galloping ahead towards a Mister Liquor's, Rit yelling, "DUDE, FUCK YEAH!" and Kyla, still behind, walking and gesturing with her hands to what I can only translate as, "What the fuck is happening?" I've just learned more about these three people in a shorter timespan than a two hour conversation at a coffee shop. And we're also all laughing.